Infosys-Oracle Blog

• Delivery to Request Date
• Delivery to Promise date
• Promise date to Request date
• Lead time improvement (Internal and Supplier)
• Product line returns
• Field Warranty rates
• Internal rework
• Setup times
• Scrap
• Inventory Turns
• Quality PPM

There are few prebuilt KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which come as standard offering in any ERP applications and some will have provision to define custom KPIs based on the industry requirements. Oracle eBS provides Daily Business Intelligence modules, Standard Oracle reports, Discoverer tool and dashboards to measure and monitor some of these metrics. There are organizations which use tools like Noetix; which gives an option to build your own dashboard, or build custom portal / intranet webpage which pull data from a data warehouse or from ERP database.

Following are some of the key aspects required to design the operational excellence metrics:

Driver
Identify the driver for the metric; ask what you are trying to achieve by capturing the metric. For example Promise date to request date this is directly driving the Customer satisfaction. This may or may not be a key metric in a distribution / storage center where the key metric can be the turnaround time for order entry to delivery instead of promise date to request date. It is very important to identify the key metric which makes sense to the organization to capture instead of having all possible metrics available in the ERP application. Some of the metrics are driven by corporate standards and reporting requirements not necessarily driven by the ERP implementation.

Audience
Identify who will use which metric and how frequently the data need to be refreshed (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual). Metrics can be grouped by departments like Shipping, Planning, Procurement, Finance, etc. for ease of distribution. Traditionally Data Analysts or IT department was preparing the data and graphs and presenting it to the business users. Now with the evolution of new interfaces like dashboards and excel file extracts users are able to directly pull the information and analyze. There are few metrics shared with external entities also like PPM which is shared with Suppliers.

Medium
Determine how the data will be distributed; it can be as simple as data extracted from database and sent in an Excel file, or sending the data in the form of a graph/ table by e-mail, Intranet website with spotlight charts and data tables, use of data analysis tools like Discoverer, displaying charts on notice board, displaying charts on each line in the shop floor, as a slide shared in regular staff meetings / newsletters. There is no single medium used as standard it purely depends on the type of metric audience.

Content
This again depends on audience; content should be simple and clear in projecting the progress. Content can be just data presented in a table or graph showing the progress. There are few metrics which need historical data to show progress like Lead time improvement, this drives the requirement to archive the data. Most of the organizations use a data warehouse to maintain historical data and use this to do analysis. For few metrics there is static data (like organization targets) also required and need provision for loading this data.

Operational excellence metric design is very important for any ERP implementation and this definition should happen early. Metrics should be clearly defined before start of the project to measure the benefits of implementation. It becomes even more important in the current recessionary times to improve operational efficiency by reducing cost, increasing Customer satisfaction and achieving operational excellence